Government Members can try to shout me down but the Taoiseach and the Government propose to halve the number of Taoiseach's questions in any given week.

At the same time as he pretends to be standing up for the rights of backbenchers, the Taoiseach is halving the opportunities that exist for backbenchers and others. Why is he doing that? It is because he wants to play this game of allowing people to pretend they are in the Opposition when they are in the Government. It will be resisted.

Have you read the UN charter?

It is hard to imagine a more impactful measure on the wellness of both people and the planet than insulating people's homes. I want to raise an incredible case in my constituency where a family is being threatened with prison for retrofitting and insulating their home. In 2018, Clive Ryan from Kilnamanagh received a Government grant from the SEAI to retrofit his home with external wall insulation. This is exactly the type of climate action that Government grants and Government policy are designed to incentivise. It…

It was just regular. Then they said that he needed planning permission but he does not have it, and he must pay a fine or take it off.

Yes, but so far it has been denied. It has not been accepted.

On Friday parents of children with additional needs were forced to sleep outside the Department of Education to try to fight for appropriate school places for their children. Earlier that day, the Government announced 254 new special classes in schools. That is much less than the 400 that had been promised. However, when you delve into the detail there are not even 254. I have correspondence with multiple schools saying these classes effectively do not exist. One school said they were in discussions with the NCSE a…

Will the Minister finally abolish the legalised discrimination and super-exploitation of young people in this country who are currently legally paid as little as €9.50 an hour, purely on the basis of their age? Will he abolish these subminimum wage rates whereby those under 18 can legally be paid less than the minimum wage? The can has been kicked down the road for years now. It is time to abolish these rates.

The Minister of State says we should not rush into a decision. It is two years since this Dáil passed a Bill that I brought forward to abolish these rates. The Government brought in a timed amendment to delay it for a year so the Low Pay Commission could report. The Low Pay Commission studied it with the ESRI study, as the Minister of State said, and it came out with clear recommendations. The Minister of State says he agrees with the commission that the Government needs to consider it. Does he agree with the commi…

Where is the nuance? Will the Minister of State tell me why 18-year-olds should be legally paid 80% of the minimum wage? They cannot tell their landlord they will only pay 80% of the rent. They cannot give a supermarket 80% of the cost of their groceries. What is the objective justification for paying a young person less than the minimum wage purely on the basis of his or her age? When is the economic impact assessment going to happen? The Department officials came before the committee in September and said they ha…

Is the Minister aware that the emissions impact of imported LNG is worse than even coal? It is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Despite that, the Taoiseach has said that we will "have to have an LNG facility of some kind." Will the Minister be going along with the Taoiseach? Will that be a so-called State-led project, as the previous Government was in favour of, or a commercial LNG? Can the Minister update us on the progress of the memo his Department is meant to be bringing forward?

I note the Minister simply ignored the actual question. That is obviously a prepared answer; he has a prepared question. I could go again. Is the Minister aware that the emissions impact of imported LNG is worse than that of coal? This is research from last October by an environmental scientist called Robert Howarth. I will give the Minister some of the lowlights. The paper states that "LNG is 33% worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal." It goes on to state that "Drillin…

It is not my contention, Minister. I do not claim to be a climate scientist. It is the contention of those who have researched the matter. Perhaps the Minister is going to ignore the science on it. The answer in terms of energy security and resilience is, first, to stop expanding data centres. They are putting our energy usage on an accelerating upward track - they are going to be at 30% by 2030 - and the Minister is basically telling them to "burn, baby, burn", let it rip and go up even higher. First, we need to r…

Hospitals, Minister?

I have to say it has been a pretty depressing debate so far, with a few honourable exceptions. Most of the Deputies have swallowed and then regurgitated the spin from big tech. I find it incredible that we had a speech from the new Minister of State with responsibility for AI and its only reference to climate change is about AI being used to help us address sustainability and climate action. There is no mention of the suggestion by many, including Donald Trump, that it will result in a doubling of our power need. T…

We are heading for climate catastrophe. We know that 2024 was the warmest year on record - 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Already, extreme weather events, hunger and sickness related to climate change are responsible for the loss of 300,000 lives a year. That figure, unfortunately, will only rise. We now have a climate denier in the White House. He says, "drill, baby, drill", but here we have a government supported by climate deniers which is saying, "Burn, baby, burn", to big tech and its data centres. F…

Will the Taoiseach abandon the plan to import expensive-----

-----and dirty fossil fuels from America and will he reverse the course on data centres?

The signal the Taoiseach is sending is that he does not care about the climate change challenge and about the emissions targets, because we will blow right past them. He does not care. He does not care about the bills that are going up for ordinary people. He does not care about people who are forced to pay carbon taxes when they have no other way to get to work. He does not care about energy resilience and sustainability when we now have over 20% of our electricity going to data centres. Why? Because big tech says…

This is the crisis facing humanity right now. We need to make the choices. The choice the Taoiseach is making is to put-----